As competition intensifies between service providers of telephony services, providers are looking for services which provide great value and flexibility for their subscribers. Services which increase the likelihood of a calling party reaching the person to whom they wish to contact can provide subscribers with increased flexibility and increase service provider revenues.
With recent advances in technology which now make working from home a possibility, telephone service providers are seeing an increase in subscribers requesting one or more additional and separate telephone lines to their existing residence line. These additional telephone lines and respective telephone sets are used generally to satisfy their business needs and in most cases the physical telephone set connected to this business line is in a location quite remote to any sets connected to the primary residence line or to other lines. In a work at home environment for example, it is very common and certainly desirable to be able to work in many different parts of ones house over the course of the day to take advantage of different atmospheres. A common problem however can occur when for example, when a business call comes in on the subscribers second or non business line when the subscriber happens to be in a room or even building (garage or studio) quite remote from the business telephone set. The subscriber may be unaware of the incoming call to the business line or may have problems getting to the phone before the caller drops the call.
In a similar manner and for the same reasons calls to the primary residence line or any of the other subscriber lines may be missed when the subscriber is not in the near vicinity of terminals associated with these other lines. In either case the subscriber may end up missing the call.
In existence today are telephones which can be connected to more than one line and which allow a user to switch between lines. These telephones however are generally more expensive and are not usually found throughout the home environment.
Some Service Providers today offer services to help prevent customers from missing an incoming call to one of their other lines just because they may not be physically nearby at the moment of the incoming call. For example, certain service providers today offer flexibility by providing their subscribers with a 1-500 service. The service allows a subscriber to inform a respective service provider which terminals, each of which has a unique directory number (DN), the subscriber wishes to be alerted simultaneously in response to an incoming call to the subscribers 1-500 number. A directory number is a number which has a direct association with a line appearance on a physical switch and to which a physical terminal is associated. Switch translations are capable of directly translating a DN into a line port or line appearance on a switch within a wire line or wireless network.
In the event of an incoming call to the special 1-500 number the service providers network will correspondingly alert those terminals corresponding to DNs provided by the subscriber and contained in a customer lookup table or profile. These directory numbers are generally spread throughout the public network and examples would include perhaps a subscribers residence line, his or her cottage line, their cellular line and their downtown office line. The alerted terminal which first responds by going off hook for example is connected to the calling party associated with the incoming call. Incoming calls however, to any of the individual DNs contained in the lookup table or profile rather than the special 1-500 number will however only be routed by the network to the individual terminal corresponding to that DN. Callers who wish to contact a subscriber to the 1-500 service may not be able to if they are unaware of the 1-500 number and the subscriber happens not to be in the physical location corresponding to the individual terminal being called. The 1-500 service is hardly transparent to the subscriber as it requires a separate and additional number.
Other service providers provide their subscribers with substantially the same service by providing a new separate personal telephone number and associate a customer profile to that personal number. The customer profile is used by the service providers network to assist in the routing of an incoming call to the subscribers personal number. A caller who is aware of the `personal number` can attempt to reach the subscriber by dialing their personal telephone number and in much the same way as for the 1-500 service an incoming call to the personal number will be routed according to the subscribers profile to one or more of the subscribers terminals, each of which would have their own DN. The shortfalls of this method are substantially the same as for the 1-500 service. Numbers such as the `1-500` and the `personal number` described herein are not considered to be directory numbers as defined in this specification.
Service providers implementing these types of services generally require additional network equipment such as adjuncts or Intelligent Peripherals (IPs) to assist in the call set-ups to the additional directory numbers found in subscriber profiles.
There is a need therefore for service providers to provide a service which minimizes the chances of subscribers missing incoming calls to their different lines having different directory numbers and without the need for requiring special telephone sets (which are capable of being connected to more than one line), no requirement for adjuncts and without requiring special numbers other than the assigned subscriber line directory numbers.